LiLi Johnson

Remarks:

My research is engaged with critical analyses of contemporary neoliberalism and multiculturalism in the context of Asian American family and kinship in North American culture. My current book manuscript is titled Technologies of Family: Asian American Racial Formation and the Making of Kinship, and it traces the construction of the Asian American family as a systematic site of racial formation in American culture. It argues that kinship itself has been newly constructed through, what I call, “technologies of family” – systems such as government bureaucracy, immigration policy, photography, online profiles, and ancestry tests, each of which serve as a case study. These technologies demonstrate the ways in which Asian American family and kinship have been endowed with narrative fantasies of identification, intimacy, and belonging that define racial categorization.

I am also at work on a second long-term project that explores the cultural genealogy of the term “transracial” in North American adoption practices. Spanning North American “domestic” adoption of African American and Indigenous children in the twentieth century through to later transnational adoption from Asia, South America, and Africa, the project examines how cultural narratives about the mixed race adoptive family has reflected and reproduced the changing meanings of race across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I am also cross-appointed in the Program in Gender & Women's Studies. And my teaching includes courses on Asian North American feminisms, gender and sexuality, digital media, visual culture, photography, and race and multiculturalism. For information, visit my website at lilijohnson.com.

Selected Publications:

“A Technology of Family: Photography and Kinship Formation in Transnational Adoption from Asia.” American Quarterly 74, no. 4 (December 2022): 921-943.

“Transnational Family Photographs and Adoption From Asia.” Trans-Asia Photography Review 11.1 (Spring 2021). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0011.103/--transnational-family-photographs-and-adoption-from-asia?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

“Searching in Photographs: Photography and the Chinese Birth Parent Search.” Adoption & Culture 6.1 (2019): 116-134.

“Paper Family Photography: Photography and the State in the Era of Paper Families and Chinese Exclusion (1882-1943).” Photography and Culture. 10.2 (2017): 105-119.